WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
To continue on my boring Luddite making obvious points run one of the reasons I think iPhones and internet are bad for us is because the task space we dwell in, our primary environment (Screen) doesn’t allow us to construct Meaning and position ourselves within the life process as described above.

Nothing boring there. Spot on imho.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
(edit: inserted quote to better frame dialogue)
To continue on my boring Luddite making obvious points run one of the reasons I think iPhones and internet are bad for us is because the task space we dwell in, our primary environment (Screen) doesn’t allow us to construct Meaning and position ourselves within the life process as described above.

"Task space" is a cool way of thinking about it. I guess the task, most generally, is to exhibit your preferences.
 
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constant escape

winter withered, warm
Rather than bury them. Because any kind of algorithmic overseer can only assume you are operating according to your preferences, and thus it must cater to whatever behavior you exhibit. If you exhibit your preferences, the algorithm is met with comparative success, and that successful part of it persists into some next iteration. Evolution of algorithms.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
That our preferences are influenced/determined by the algorithm? I'd say the most useful reading would involve some kind of two way river where they are upstream from eachother, some kind of feedback setup, however nuanced.

edit: Just noticed the "also" in your post. I wrote the above under the impression that you were just pointing out some exclusively opposite set up.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
If the arrow of causality is indeed a two way river, as in some kind of feedback situation, with the algorithm "trying" to sniff our preferences and incorporate optimal handlings of our preferences, and the human/consumer/subject... what? Just drifting into ever more convenient virtual task spaces? Maybe the subject here is the neoliberal subject.

Integration of economical sensibility into the psychic core. Self-marketing, self-optimization, the spiritual element of mindfulness - being better at being in the now, reading the now, working the now - exhibiting more robust and precise behaviors to both their own advantage and the advantage of the algorithm which now has more nuanced data to gather.

So the passive task of the human, from the higher order perspective, is just to stand still and get milked as efficiently as possible. But what might a more active task look like? How can we really enter into conversation with some higher order ontology?
 

vimothy

yurp
if the causality goes in both directions the outcome is indeterminate, multiple equilibria are possible. it's not that the user simply manipulates the interface and gets better and better results, a more accurate picture of what they want to see. instead any passing attraction can be picked up on and, via a mutually reinforcing feedback loop, be blown up into a full scale obsession. one minute youre innocently watching music vids on youtube, a few feedback cycles later youre describing donald trump as based and eating nothing but red meat for every meal.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
And the rate across that range, from naive first iteration to radicalized final, is what you argue is intensifying, accelerating, no?

I would say so, from what I gather. I think its that the mind has begun to finally bank into its blindspots, reach around and scratch the itch on its back despite it being out of sight. The sight would be the consciousness of the psyche, no? And the rube goldberg contrivance we use to scratch out backs would be our techne, our developing precision of will actualization (?), ever more elaborate and efficient.

But while this added-range afforded by techne is grounded in our will, it extends beyond it. So not intelligent, from what seems to be our sense of that word. While not intelligent, there will be an increasing majority of its operations that the increasing majority of people have next to no understanding of. We become enshrouded by it, no? It becomes our world, or our "primary environment" as someone here, @luka I think, called it.

And the point has already been made about the hastening of individuation, a hastening of the determining of ones optimal neoliberal personality. Ever more niches to identify with, an ever fragmenting archipelago, the entire mosaic of which is the variation across ideology. The island, the individual psychic system; the archipelago, the higher order socio-psychic system.

This hastening is administered dynamically by our techne, and embodied statically in our tech. The moment the tech itself becomes dynamic would the the point of AI, perhaps, but that doesn't seem like an inevitable outcome.

"if the causality goes in both directions the outcome is indeterminate, multiple equilibria are possible."

There are multiple equilibrium in genetic evolution, various speciations and eventual geni, no? Within the virtual field of possible genetic permutations there are multiple effective pathways, multiple equilibria, but within the virtual field of the possible tournament outcomes between these equilibria, one will prove more optimal than the rest.

So we need to see the various possible effective permutations before we can see how they would interact. And arguably the outcome of the tournament will just graduate to become the groundling of the higher order tournament. Some phenotype may win out against its neighboring margin of variations, but millimeter-wide beak-size variation is trivial vis-a-vis an AK-47.
 

vimothy

yurp
i think what's new is chiefly that human desires, interests, dispositions, are increasingly being manipulated and driven forward, not by human intelligence towards particular ends (such as by the shadowy figures in a traditional conspiracy theory), but by blind statistical automata, merely as the side effect of optimising some distant cost function
 

luka

Well-known member
But I’d like to extend that a little into how Heidegger’s publicness is also operating and intruding in our privateness and in our solitudes, not just what we sayabout literature and art for instance, but what we think about it, how we feel in response to it. Meanings are attached to images for instance, there are sets of associations there, a kind of shorthand, ordained by the culture we find ourselves embedded in. these do not preclude a more personal response but they at the very least coexist with that personal response and modulate it. Sunset over blue lagoon, wild horses galloping across open prairie, desolate moor in moonlight, white tablecloth, white wine, scallops on restaurant balcony overlooking Mediterranean harbour, blue swimming pool in a glare of Californian light, ice creaking, cracking and shearing off into arctic ocean, wolves howling in northern pine forest, children with dirty faces playing on cobblestoned streets, frozen in a black and white photograph, all this operates, in its public aspect, as a learned language.


"The revival of a set of feelings very ready to be revived, and the strict conformity of the poem with what many people have been taught to expect from "nature-poetry" undoubtedly explains much of its popularity."

I.A Richards. Practical Criticism.
 

luka

Well-known member
What I am saying is there are well worn zones of feeling, big swamplands of the done to death, and certain buttons that, being pressed, instantly lead you back to that zone of affect. Ah, the soulful house hinterlands, those warm chords, ah my bubble bath, let me sink uncritically beneath the warm water. Is that an impassioned black preacher I hear? "House is a feeling" ah yes, I like this place

Bad art specialises in the pressing of these buttons.
 

luka

Well-known member
Do you understand what the presets are?

"What we have left behind is a notion of art as a limited number of buttons which being pressed give rise to a corresponding number of effects, and these being all neatly demarcated and known be it melancholy titillation or the uncanny."
 

luka

Well-known member
What we are all leaving behind here is a notion of art as a limited number of buttons which being pressed give rise to a corresponding number of effects, and these being all neatly demarcated and known be it melancholy titillation or the uncanny and nor are we impressed with advanced practioners who have learned to press more than one button at once.

This incidently is one of the major arguments of a book called vegetable empire in which these buttons or pre-sets are rendered as dictions and the dictions as characters or SHELLS. As for instance the English schoolboy lyric poet

"Hello sun! Hello sky!
Hello drifting cloud! Hello trees! Hello grass,
O! Hello mossy rock:
 
And the point has already been made about the hastening of individuation, a hastening of the determining of ones optimal neoliberal personality. Ever more niches to identify with, an ever fragmenting archipelago, the entire mosaic of which is the variation across ideology. The island, the individual psychic system; the archipelago, the higher order socio-psychic system.

the draw of this is irresistible but in the end sad and unsatisfying. this is one of the worst things about having to be a person today. I, we, need more of the communal experience
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
the draw of this is irresistible but in the end sad and unsatisfying. this is one of the worst things about having to be a person today. I, we, need more of the communal experience
I get a feeling now and then that satisfaction is increasingly exclusively reserved for the hermit, stepping out of the river. Or else, your level of enlightenment needs to be high enough to withstand the intensifying currents without losing your balance.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
One way to sustain a satisfaction and stay in the flow of things is to divest from completion and invest in progress. Reaching a finish line is desirable to the former, but undesirable to the latter because it means no more progress. That is why capitalism is so much better suited for advancement, because its stasis is paradoxically dynamic, its equilibrium is a state of continuation.

This doesn't need to be expressed in terms of money though. We tend to reduce capitalism to being oriented around money, only because our judgement of value is so dependent on money, no? We're the ones who care so much about money. To complexity, money is probably nothing more than a feedback network, a circulatory system of abstracted-value-reconcreted-into-paper that regulates material complexification.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
As far as I know, a capitalist techgnosis that manages to tap into the veins within these currents (imaging an attractor/point within a distribution, and stack a loooong series of those slides next to each other temporally, and you will have a thread within a sort of wind-current, the distribution repositioning itself in reaction to an attractor that repositions itself in reaction to the distribution, and so on), could quite possibly impregnate the veins with something identifiably marxist.
 
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